HMD has come up with a novel way to make the phone easily openable while maintaining its water resistance (IP54 rated, meaning it can resist splashes, but not immersion).
They also have a screw-based system that allows the display to be easily removed and replaced, and a really cool adhesive system for securing the battery.
No, it’s not an iPhone, but it does show that a bit of creativity can massively improve repairability without going back to 20 year old designs.
I’d be happier with the iPhone’s IP68 (dust-tight plus immersion to one meter) myself.
What would be interesting is if a phone with a replaceable battery had an internal bridge battery that can keep the phone powered for, say, 15 minutes while you were swapping the replaceable battery. That is another issue with having a replaceable battery - because it is modular, it’s going to have less run time than a comparably sized phone with a non-swappable battery. I live in a place with terrible mobile signal, so trying to keep a signal drains the battery. In the house I’m fine, as I have a network extender, but once I am out of range and walking or driving somewhere the signal drops off to almost nothing. So because my phone is often trying to connect to the carrier, it can drain the battery pretty quickly. If the swappable battery was 75% the size of the iPhone’s battery, I might have to swap before the end of the day.
Definitely a nice idea, but a backup battery would consume a not-insignificant amount of space. While it might be useful to be able to swap a battery while you’re in the middle of a call, I suspect that requiring a shutdown (as has been the case for all phones with replaceable batteries) wouldn’t be a deal-breaker for most of us.
Well, yes, because the (presumably plastic) enclosure and contacts take up space. But not necessarily a lot of space. I’ve seen some replaceable battery packs that did not seem to be significantly larger than the battery itself.
That seems like an extreme difference. I would expect a replaceable battery to have 95% (or higher) capacity, relative to a non-replaceable battery packs of identical size.